A Familiar Calamity
by Rakeesh
Summary: When you battle a great foe, you will either triumph or be defeated... there is no middle ground. Louise would battle the storm, and win.


One foot in front of the other, step by step.

Walking wasn't something Louise de la Valliere thought about often. In fact, she thought she'd mastered the process long ago, and had moved on to more interesting things, like trying to figure out why her magic didn't work (though, if she was to be honest, if she had to choose between having proper magic and being able to walk, well… she'd have to think about it). And she was trying desperately _not_ to think about it right now… because if she did, she couldn't do it-

_-the Centipede's Dilemma, it was a poem-_

-and she'd fall over, and the two-thousand ton jaeger would follow.

The huge machine rumbled around her in their journey to battle. Beside her in the command pod was Saito, a few feet away and yet closer to her than anyone had ever been in her life. His movements matched her own exactly, duplicated and read by the complicated motion-capture controls of the hulking metal golem-

_-robot, not golem-_

-as it imitated their motions, stride by stride, as they made their way across the forested landscape of Tristain toward the Valliere lands. Even the tallest trees barely came up to their chest, and the wooden giants were batted aside and crushed in their haste. A jaeger's path was not subtle… behind them was a trail of broken trunks and the deep imprints of their footsteps, nearly five tons of ground pressure per square foot with every step. Fortunately they were taking a path not frequented by people - bulling their way straight through the forest, instead of following the more meandering cart trails - so there was little worry about stepping on someone.

Behind and far above them a dragon was flittering… Tabitha and her familiar. Kirche was probably with them. From anyone else they'd be hidden, but a jaeger's sensors were alien and powerful, bringing up a softly glowing image in front of her as sharp and as clear as if she was staring through a looking glass. But she wasn't particularly interested in what the other two girls did so long as they stayed out of their way, so they ignored them.

Their target would be in front.

Louise's people, and most of Halkeginia, simply called them the _monstrum_. Nearly sixty years before, a portal had appeared on the bottom of the ocean, west of Albion, and the huge, destructive monsters had emerged from it. Three had appeared, over the course of years, before the ocean water spirits had managed to alert humanity and the elves. One more had appeared before the great alliance had managed to close the portal. It had been a massive effort, even with the power of the elves. Many humans, and even some of the beautiful immortals, had spent their magic unto death to close that gate.

But it had been done, in an act that - just maybe - had the first hints of thawing relations with the legendary and terrible elves. Nothing brought differing peoples together like a mutual threat.

The source destroyed, they were left with the four monstrum that had already emerged. For years they had been running rampant… entire towns and villages would simply disappear, crushed underfoot. There were rumours that the elves had managed to kill one - just one - but only at immense cost. The only factor holding back the devastation was that the monstrum roamed the entirety of the world, and humanity was so spread out. A country could go decades without an attack.

_-pray to God they're all male and haven't been breeding out in the water-_

Unfortunately, Tristain's time had run out.

It had been only breakfast when the dragon-rider had arrived with word of the attack. One of the monstrum had rampaged across Germania and was headed west toward Tristain. It was unlikely to pass by the Academy, so the students were advised not to leave. But the lands of Louise's family, the Valliere estates, were on that border, and directly in the beast's path.

She likely wouldn't have a home to return to when she left the Academy.

It was the latest in a series of devastating blows for Louise… she was already exiled among the student population, more ridiculed than usual, after the disastrous outcome of her familiar summoning. When the jaeger had appeared, she had been thrilled beyond measure, ignoring the colossal explosion that had marked its arrival. A golem surely meant she was an earth mage like her sisters, right? And such a golem! It was taller than the central tower of the Academy! It was beautiful, painted red and gold, and the face of it was likewise golden, its visage shaped into the image of a knight's helmet. Shining steel glittered in the late-afternoon sun. Its joints groaned loudly as its limbs moved slightly, but even those tiny movements promised leashed violence and _power_.

Before she could begin celebrating or crowing to her jeering classmates, the golem had taken a single, clumsy step. Just one. And then it had fallen, crumbling to its knees and then onto its face, crushing a large part of the Academy walls. Louise and Professor Colbert had barely escaped being crushed underneath; one of the new familiars, a bugbear, had not been so fortunate. Clarissa de Verte still refused to talk to Louise.

_-how many times do I have to apologize-_

And then, as a final blow, a person had climbed out of the head of the golem. Just a person, a man with strange features and strange armor. A _commoner_, who introduced himself as Saito.

Louise had been forced to complete the familiar bond with this man.

It was shame beyond measure; her triumph, turned to crushing defeat… literally. All the adult mages at the school together couldn't lift the jaeger and they couldn't figure out how to repair the wall without doing so-

_-they didn't even_ ask_ me, I would have tried-_

She had summoned a strange yet boring familiar, and caused massive damage to the school at the same time, far worse than the classrooms she'd shattered. It was worse than summoning nothing at all, and the other students at the Academy made sure she knew it. Mere weeks later the news of the attack had arrived, and she was certain God was punishing her.

Her mother wouldn't retreat before the monstrum. Karin the Heavy Wind _never_ gave way. She'd try to fight it, and she would fail… if an army of _elves_, with their legendary magical powers, had to be spent to bring one down… what hope could her mother have, alone? Valliere Mansion would be crushed, and likely her mother along with it. And she'd die thinking her daughter a failure.

Louise had been in her room, sobbing, when Saito found her. He'd heard of the monstrum's attack, and had sought her out. He found her and told her he could help.

She'd slapped him-

_-face still hurts-_

-thinking he was teasing her, since she'd been treating him so abominably. But no, he insisted, he meant it, but there was only a chance, and if they were going to try he'd need her help.

She was so broken, so bereft of hope, that she'd simply followed, curious and numb at the same time, as he'd lead her to the golem, which he'd insisted over and over was called a "jaeger". He'd opened the hatch from which he'd emerged, and lead her inside. Within the head was strange machinery and glowing lights, and it'd been bewilderment as much as despair that had kept her quiet as he'd produced a strange outfit, seemingly made of a strange shiny leather and metal.

The spare interface suit had not fit well, but Guiche of all people had proven useful, the gaping blond earth-mage using his magic to shrink the metal and plastic outfit to suit her petite figure-

_-gonna have a talk with him later, didn't like the way he was looking at you-_

-and soon she was crawling back into the head of the fallen metal figure. Connecting to the motion-capture apparatus was difficult with the jaeger lying prone, but they'd managed it. Saito had placed a helmet of some sort upon her head, and then moved beside her to repeat the procedure for himself. Soon they were both "engaged", hanging from metal arms and their feet encased in metallic, free-moving boots.

The jaeger wasn't a golem, he'd explained… it was closer to armour. And it needed a mind, a will to move it… and it was so huge that a _single_ mind wasn't enough. That was why he needed her. They would join - _Drift_, he called it - into what was effectively one being, one will, the soul of the jaeger.

The concept was terrifying. At any other time, she would have refused, and beaten him like a dog for even suggesting it. But she was beaten down herself, and her family was going to die. She had no magic worth spit to offer. If her only option was this Drifting - which sounded dangerously like some kind of soul magic to her - she would take the chance.

He had turned a switch on the glowing metal panel in front of him.

Louise had fallen.

No… she _drifted_.

Louise had no idea what sex was like - and neither did Saito, though for some reason he was extremely embarrassed by that - but she couldn't imagine it could possibly be more intimate than this. He _knew_ her, more completely than Henrietta or even Cattleya, to whom she told everything. He knew her struggles with magic, about the incredibly long shadow cast by her mother. He knew her total fear of failure, not just of disappointing her parents, but of the very cold reality of nobles in the kingdoms of this medieval world who considered people without magic to be little more than clever animals.

_-arrogant, bigoted bastards-_

An attitude she'd come very close to sharing, now thoroughly crushed out of her. Because she knew him as well, and found in him a counterpart to her own experiences. Like her, he'd excelled at practice, at all the theory of piloting a jaeger provided by the Ranger Academy. An excellent hand-to-hand combatant, he should have been an exceptional ranger. But just like Louise couldn't tame her magic, neither could Saito tame the Drift. He was incompatible with _everyone_, and all his study and hard work was utterly useless without someone to match him.

And he, too, was caught in the shadow of another: fellow orphan Mako Mori. They'd both lost their families the same day. They'd both become rangers in response, out of a need to confront their fears and avenge their families. But unlike Saito, Mako had been adopted by perhaps the most famous jaeger pilot in existence; and unlike Saito, Mako had _found_ a Drift partner, in the nearly-as-famous Raleigh Beckett. Though their initial trial had almost been a disaster, it was only a matter of time before Marshall Pentecost would deploy them in _Gipsy Danger_, a resurrected jaeger like _Calamity_, if a bit older; pulled from the grave and rebuilt to sally forth to glory once more.

Saito, partnerless, had been shunted to maintenance. Instead of operating the jaegers, he was stuck tending to those who could. Just as Louise, without magic, would be treated… bartered off as a wife, to serve some minor lord or another, for political alliances and to produce properly magical children. It had been at the depths of his own despair that Saito had quietly made his way into the newly-refurbished jaeger for which he was responsible: the Mark-IV _Calamity Omega_. A jaeger, rebuilt after the deaths of the original pilots, the head of the machine literally ripped off and crushed; sidelined due to lack of competent pilot _pairs_ to operate her. Saito had, violating orders and every regulation in the Defense Corps, put on an interface suit and plugged himself in. And at that moment Louise's magic had pulled him - and the jaeger he was bonded to - away from his world.

Now, thanks to the Drift, Louise could recognize his actions as the suicide attempt they were-

_-not suicide, come on-_

-the load of a jaeger was too much for one person, it would have killed him or left him so badly damaged he might as well be dead-

_-there's been jaeger pilots who could handle the load alone, like Marshall Pentecost-_

-but she _wasn't judging_! Mere moments before Saito had found her, she had been thinking - quite seriously - of putting her magical explosions to their final use, exactly as so many of her classmates had suggested so often-

_-bastards, all of them, glad you didn't-_

-and she was glad she didn't, too.

Saito had expected the Drift to barely hold together. He just needed her as a sink, to take some of the weight of the jaeger so he could maneuver it. He expected to need to fight her every step of the way. Louise had a fairly dominant personality, and Saito was quiet and followed orders… an alpha and a beta never made good Drift partners.

But no. The instant Saito turned the switch, the moment they fell into each other's minds… something had happened. Louise could feel Saito's left hand tingling as easily as she might have felt her own. The Drift index shot to the absolute peak possible, as high as Saito had ever _heard_ of happening. Saito, knowing Louise's own thoughts, had peeled off his left glove and found the familiar runes - the runes Louise's own magic had placed there - glowing brightly.

Beneath and around them, _Calamity _purred eagerly.

Louise and Saito, their minds and knowledge joined, had immediately leaped to a conclusion: the runes bonded the familiar to the master. The familiar and master became effectively one person, according to the laws of Tristain; they had been bonded long before ever entering the Drift. They were perfect Drift partners _because_ of her magic.

Elation made _Calamity_'s limbs shiver. Within each other, they found the completion of their dreams: Louise's magic proved that Saito could Drift. Saito's Drift proved that Louise had magic. Together, through magic and through science, they became _Calamity Omega._

Not that everything was perfect. Though Saito had training, he'd never really piloted a jaeger before. Louise had no experience with technology of any sort! And yet here she was, suddenly half of the guiding will of a mechanical superweapon from Saito's world. She had access to the memories of his training, yes, but knowledge was not skill... and though she had some minor fencing experience, she'd been raised as a proper noble girl. She was far more likely to try to resolve a violent situation with magic, explosions or not, and if she swung a hand, it was as a delicate slap... not a closed fist. Saito would guide her, but needing to correct her reactions through the Drift would slow down the jaeger's movements, which in a battle could be deadly.

But there was no time for training, and no kwoon to be found at the Academy anyway. She would learn on the way to the Valliere lands, and that would have to do.

_Calamity_'s first real steps since her reconstruction were clumsy, halting. Working together, the pair pushed the huge mecha to a kneeling position, and then staggered to their feet in a deafening roar of metal and actuators. They planted the right foot a little too hard; windows around the Academy, recently repaired from the jaeger's _last_ fall, shattered all over again. They wavered, and Louise instinctively swung an arm to balance herself, which resulted in a metal hand the size of a classroom punching through the central tower worryingly close to where the Headmaster's office was located.

_-don't think anyone was inside, don't worry about it too much-_

With Saito's help they'd been able to extract the hand without doing too much more damage, and - with steps that were akin to that of a toddler learning to walk - they'd begun their journey to Valliere Mansion, hoping they'd arrive in time. They destroyed a bit more of the Academy wall and nearly toppled the jaeger onto its face while leaving.

Saito was figuring out how to put his training to practice, and Louise had the concentration of the truly desperate. They walked, at first clumsily and then with increasing stability; meanwhile, they practiced moving the arms and shoulders of the giant mecha, striking poses and working their way up to experimental punches which nearly put them on the ground again… a swinging fist made of a hundred tons of metal didn't stop as easily as its tiny flesh-and-bone counterpart.

Within an hour _Calamity_ was walking with the confident stride one would expect from an eighty-yard-tall war machine. Together they decided to risk speeding up to a jog, and the forest rumbled with the thunder of their passage.

Strangely, it was Saito who nearly RABITed, twice, instead of the far less experienced Louise. But she came by her mental discipline honestly, being the daughter of Karin de la Valliere, and she was honest enough within the Drift to admit that her life was fairly sheltered and pampered. So when he was nearly caught up in his own memories, when he went back to being that little boy spending three horrible days trapped in a crushed car with only the bloating bodies of his mother and father to keep him company, it was Louise who pulled him back. He would say nothing, but embarrassment, gratitude, and sorrow was easily felt across their link. He guided the movements of the jaeger, and she guided the movements of his mind, with affection and camaraderie she hadn't known she possessed or was even capable of mere hours before, and would never have admitted to if she had.

Within the Drift, there were no secrets.

Her attraction to him was laid bare, which was embarrassing, but eased a bit by the fact that it was mutual. It was also a relief to simply have it known… only God knows how long the two would have danced around each other if left to their own devices. Of course, Saito was also very attracted to Kirche, in a far less wholesome way; and that annoyed Louise greatly because as he briefly fantasized about the buxom redhead _so did she_, and she was never going to be able to look the Germanian in the eyes again. Not without thinking about how soft those lips might be, or how it would feel to have that magnificent chest pressed against her own-

Stop that!

_-... sorry-_

There were definitely downsides to being mentally linked to a young man.

Fortunately, they were finally near their destination, Louise recognizing the bridge and river located near her home. Above them they could see griffon riders, soldiers sent by Princess Henrietta to do what little they could to defend her staunchest supporters. The battle was close, far closer than she'd hoped, as the mansion was very near. She was surprised by how quickly Saito's mind switched from thoughts of debauchery to the necessities of combat; she felt his own pleasure at having impressed her.

They crested a rise, a large hill that Louise had sometimes slid down in winter as a child whenever her mother and eldest sister weren't watching and she could get away with it. And there was the Valliere mansion, grand and beautiful, but heavily damaged. Not far away was the the monstrum... the _kaijuu_, as Saito's people referred to them. Four-legged and long, it stood as high as _Calamity Omega_'s chest, possessing a frog-like head with thick bone around the lower jaw. A long, thick tail like that of a salamander waved around behind it, and as they watched it impacted with a corner of the mansion, crushing what Louise knew to be the kitchen and dining room.

"No…" Did she say that? It was her voice, it must have been.

The griffon knights swarmed around it, nimbly avoiding the huge beast's attacks but doing almost nothing in return. Few wore armour, opting for greater speed and nimbleness over a weight of steel that would do absolutely nothing if they were unlucky enough to be hit. And above it all was her mother's manticore, as an enraged Karin 'The Heavy Wind' unleashed her powerful magics against it. But even the attacks of the mightiest mage in Tristain were mere mosquito bites against the monster, though Saito was shocked to see numerous wounds bleeding luminous, toxic kaijuu-blue… he knew how hard it was to penetrate a kaijuu's hide. Louise followed his thoughts as he estimated its size, pegging it as a large category one or low cat-two, and shivered at the thought that the monsters that terrorized her world were considered puny compared to the ones that assaulted his.

The mages swooped and stung, trying to lure the creature away. But a kaijuu _always_ sought to damage as much infrastructure as possible, and the minor annoyance of the knights wasn't enough to distract it from the more tempting target of the mansion. A huge foot descended to crush part of the gardens. A fireball impacted against the creature, and Louise knew her father was in the fight as well. And there… oh no, no no… was that a golem?

_-Louise-_

-surely Cattleya wasn't helping fight, she was too sick, the effort would kill her-

_-Louise, we have to challenge it-_

Yes. Yes, they were here now. Louise found her anger, and it rippled down the link to ignite Saito as well. This creature would _not_ destroy her home, and it would _not_ kill her sister. They stepped forward, and master and familiar pounded fist against palm twice in synchronicity; around them, _Calamity Omega_ did the same, a world-shaking crash of metal against metal that announced their intentions clearly. Some of the griffon riders, fixated on the kaijuu, were shocked and nearly fell off their mounts. Some of them stopped and hovered in midair, an act of stupidity that would have gotten them killed if Louise and Saito hadn't been successful in drawing the monster's attention.

The kaijuu turned to face them, the big tail ripping off part of the roof over Louise's bedroom. She could swear the monster recognized them, it almost seemed to cringe-

_-impossible, these kaijuu have never seen a jaeger before, how would it know-_

-but still it roared in response to their own challenge. It took a step, and they stepped forward to meet it.

Karin de la Valliere was a warrior, of course, and her blood was already up, though it didn't show on her icy exterior. But her husband and child were battling below as their home was shattered around them, and even the Heavy Wind's nerves were stretched taut. So almost the instant this new behemoth came into view a spell was sizzling the air. A vacuum blade crashed against _Calamity'_s left shoulder, but a jaeger's armour was even tougher than kaijuu hide and they were barely rocked by the square-class magic. Louise felt Saito's annoyance at the distraction as Karin cast again-

_-actually, I'm pretty sure that's _you_-_

-and tapped the button, supplied by his thoughts, that would activate the jaeger's external speakers. Louise's voice rang out, unmistakable to anyone who knew her, amplified across the entire estate.

"Stop that, Mother. I'm busy."

The sensors showed Karin's jaw drop. They'd probably pay for that insolence later… her mother was not one to let comments like that slide. But that was later.

For now, there was only the kaijuu and _Calamity Omega_. There was only Saito and Louise, made one, drunk with validation and exhilaration and thousands of tons of metal and fury. Tomorrow she'd go back to being the good little girl, the obedient daughter, the stellar academic and miserable mage. Right now she was going to battle one of the terrors of the world. She was going to beat the unbeatable.

Beat it to death with giant, metal fists.


End file.
